Fight Like a Girl – A Truly Offensive Book

This may be the most offensive book that I have ever read. The author deliberately uses the vilest, most disgusting language that she can find. Hardly surprising, though, when her purpose is clearly stated on the back cover. Regarding “all women and young girls”, Clementine Ford wants to “take the emptiness and numbness they feel about being a girl in this world and turn it into rage and power.”

It’s obviously a book addressed to females but males are ruthlessly targeted from start to finish. Ford’s online presence has already exposed her to every possible objection to her extreme misandric vitriol. Reasonable comments such as “Not all men are evil woman-haters” or “Your rage is not helping” are dismissed by a vicious cocktail of twisted logic. Generalisations from history and extreme examples from the present are used to “prove” that all men are constantly focused on asserting their superiority and maintaining a self-serving patriarchy in the world. Worldwide, it must be acknowledged that there are serious issues affecting girls and women but the suggestion that Western feminism is directing its rage in the wrong direction only spurs Ford to murkier depths of foul abuse. She seems to honestly believe that this is just another misogynist plot to derail and distract the “righteous” cause of female equality. Incredibly, she denies that there even is such a thing as misandry (hatred of men), since everything already works to uphold the patriarchy. A wild exaggeration used to support a ridiculous assertion.

Speaking of gender equality, this surely goes to the heart of the problem. Males and females are different and we should be able to celebrate that difference. But, in Ford’s view, equality has to mean sameness. In her case, that seems to mean that women should be more like men, or her perception of men at least, that is that they should be more aggressive and confrontational – witness the constant foul language.

One example of Ford’s twisted logic comes from p259. In lamenting what she sees as a prevailing “rape culture”. In response to the suggestion that women should “be careful and make sensible choices”, she writes: “Men cannot have it both ways. They can’t instruct us on how to behave to avoid danger from Bad People and then get outraged when we decide that this might include them.” Of course it’s not only men who try to caution young women about what they wear and how drunk they get in certain situations. But Ford’s statement turns thoughtfulness and genuine care for women into complicity with rape!

Ford obviously lives in a different world to me. I see a world where girls and women are constantly encouraged to achieve great things, where females outnumber males in university, where women are doing all the things that men used to do, where women are empowered and men are often confused and disempowered. But, in Christ, and in God’s Church, I see a whole subculture where women are deeply respected and honoured, not for beating men at their own game but for being who they were created to be, beautiful, loving, caring mothers, daughters, sisters and friends.

This book sends all the wrong messages. There is a sadness underneath it all because the author felt worthless and hated in her early life. But turning this rage against half of the human race and seeing misogynist motives in everything men say and do is not going to help anyone.